In 1992, there was an explosion of 'stock fever' in Shanghai. 'From the moment I set foot in Shanghai until my last day there, people from all walks of life wanted to talk to me about the market', Ellen Hertz writes. Her 1998 study sets the stock market and its players in the context of Shanghai society, and it probes the dominant role played by the state, which has yielded a stock market very different from those of the West. A trained anthropologist, she explains the way in which investors and officials construct a 'moral storyline' to make sense of this great structural innovation, identifying a struggle between three groups of actors - the big investors, the little investors, and the state - to control the market.
This article is fueled by irritation with obscurantism in and posturing around ‘theory’ in contemporary anthropology. It examines three examples of contemporary anthropological production that build on what has become a cult reference in this regard, the incomprehensible A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. These examples involve the reconceptualization of crafting (Ingold), of causation (Remme) and of the rhizome (Mueller), each of which mobilizes Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual lexicon in a specific and distinct way. Nourished by these examples, and despite her initial skepticism, the author concludes that the obscurity of Deleuze and Guattari’s overwrought prose can nonetheless lead to interesting anthropological analyses that engage variously with this work to produce real theoretical and empirical insights. The article concludes, however, that the disciplinary economy of this production values ‘theory’ over and above attempts to describe ‘reality’. Then, building on Boltanski’s distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘the world’, it proposes what the author argues is a more useful mobilization of theory, dedicated to producing more accurate and just descriptions of the world we live in.
Nouvelles Questions Féministes aborde ici une question centrale pour la recherche et la lutte féministes : l'imbrication des divers systèmes d'oppression. La nécessité de monter deux numéros sur cette question (le suivant paraîtra à la fin de l'année) nous a été en quelque sorte imposée par le débat qu'a suscité « l'affaire du foulard » en France et la mise en place d'une loi interdisant aux élèves de porter tout signe religieux « ostentatoire » dans les écoles publiques. Sous une pression politique et médiatique intense, c'est dans l'urgence que les féministes françaises, les militant·e·s antiracistes ainsi que tous les partis politiques et autres acteurs de la société civile ont dû prendre position sur la loi. Et très vite ont émergé deux points de vue. D'un côté, l'argument de la défense des droits des femmes et de l'égalité des sexes a servi de justification à la loi, et fut porté d'abord par des groupes politiques, puis des associations et des féministes. De l'autre, la dénonciation des aspects discriminatoires de la loi et le refus d'exclure des jeunes filles de l'école ont motivé l'opposition à la loi, par des militant·e·s antiracistes mais aussi par des féministes.Toutefois, dans le débat public et les médias, l'argument « droits des femmes » a nettement dominé. Ceci nous a incitées, dans ce numéro, à ne pas présenter toutes les positions, mais à écrire et solliciter des articles qui permettent de comprendre quels sont les soubassements de la loi, qui évidemment ne se présente pas ouvertement comme discriminatoire. De son vrai nom -celui que tout le monde lui donne, en France comme ailleursla loi sur le foulard cible pourtant avant tout la communauté musulmane, composée dans sa majorité d'immigré·e·s originaires des pays du Maghreb et d'Afrique subsaharienne, anciennement colonisés par la France, et de leurs filles et fils né·e·s en France. On ne peut donc ignorer que la loi a NQF Vol. 25, No 1 / 2006 | 5. Édito Grand angle | Champ libre | Parcours | Comptes rendus | Collectifs De l'affaire du voile à l'imbrication du sexisme et du racisme
‘The business of business is business,’ Milton Friedman, a leading figure of the Chicago School of economic thought, famously declaimed. In his 1970 article, ‘The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits’, he argued that corporate managers who factor social and environmental considerations into their decision-making are, in effect, ‘imposing taxes . . . and deciding how the tax proceeds shall be spent’. By deviating from their organizational duties—maximizing profits for the companies that employ them—they are appropriating money owed to shareholders and allocating it to broader social causes, a function that resembles government. Friedman objects to this behavior not on economic or legal but on political grounds: managers have not been elected and there are no principled procedures for determining which causes to support beyond ‘general exhortations from on high’ (Friedman 1970: 17). He also expresses scepticism about ‘hypocritical window-dressing’, concluding: ‘our institutions, and the attitudes of the public make it in their self-interest to cloak their actions in this way’ (Friedman 1970: 17).
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